Like it or not, many people will be running media center. ..
It's really not your palce to tell other people what they like is bad.
But maybe it is our place to mock them when they knowingly do something to hurt themselves, and then complain about the consequences of their foolish choice.
They saw the word "Microsoft." They knew they would suffer (because it isn't 1977 anymore; Microsoft's values are well-known now) if they bought it. They bought it anyway. They suffered as a consequence. Then they complained about the suffering. Should we put our heads in the sand and pretend they're not ridiculous?
This was foreseeable, and lots of people foresaw it. And some people foresaw it but pretended they didn't, hoping someone else would fix their mistake. It didn't happen, and they'll now pay for their lack of integrity. I say we all join in and laugh and point.
If time-shifting is not a copyright violation, and studios implement measures to prevent time-shifting, then any DVR anti-DRM tools they've been fighting so hard against suddenly have a huge legitimate use. The whole "anti-circumvention" clause in the DMCA becomes shot for their purposes because now those tools are now "primarily" for legally time-shifting rather than for circumventing copyright protection.
I like how you think, friend, but..
If a tool is primarily intended for legal time-shifting, and the only way to accomplish that goal (legal time-shifting) is by circumventing access controls, then it is also primarily intended to circumvent access controls.
DMCA's prohibitions were never worded (and arguably, never intended) to merely prohibit circumvention by people who seek to do illegal things (such as violate copyright). It prohibits circumvention regardless of why your doing it, with some exemptions. Time-shifting is not one of the exemptions. Everything not explicitly allowed, is prohibited. That's one of the things that made it such an evil law.
AFAIK, Evolution is still a theory. A very convincing theory, I do not doubt that, but a theory nonetheless.
Well, duh. All theories are very convincing. When they cease to be theories, it is always because something has been found that makes them less convincing. "Theory" and "very convincing" are nearly synonyms.
If you ARE a POI, they will probably [do a lot of shitty things]
I guess the trick is to help make everyone a POI. Do all that crap to everyone, and 10 people will be able to enter the country per day. Then someone in power with some sense -- no wait, let's be realistic: someone in power who is tired of getting thousands of complaints per day and being the subject of a TV news show every week -- will say, "fuck it, we have to stop doing this. I just got into government for the drug and 'escort' money; I didn't run for office to be ridiculed and impeached all the time. I have a meeting with a rich industrial lobbyist in 20 minutes, and those '60 Minutes' reporters are still here in my office, asking me what my response is to the recall petition. *sigh* Julie, get me Senator Disney on the phone. We need to talk about a bill that dissolves customs. I can give him 20 more years tacked onto copyright, if he'll support this for me."
I'd suggest against the horse porn, it "is" technically illegal in the US.
Actually, that raises an interesting question. I suspect horse porn is not a violation of any federal laws, but probably a violation of some state laws. Does U.S. customs have a legitimate interest in that? Maybe anti-liberty states (e.g. Texas) need to put up their own state-customs on their highways and airports. Your international flight lands in Dallas, and a man says, "Congratulations, you have passed U.S. customs. Now stand in line for Texas' thoughtcrime filter."
What a way to miss the point. The premise is that the work you're doing, is not locally accessible. If you can work offline, then your work must be present on storage media that is passing through customs, and therefore may be compromised when government employees demand access to it.
If they choose to store the contents of your hard drive for later analysis, not at all.
Well, it's a question of whether or not "later analysis" is something you wait in line for, or something that happens later when you're already through. As long as you get through relatively unmolested, and with your machine, it's not too bad if they later want to spend their time detecting that personal secrets might have been present, and then try to crack AES -- all on their own time while you're not waiting and missing your connecting flights, appointments, etc.
As long as the machine appears to be "normal" to a superficial peek, you win. Their only countermeasure is to quarantine every entering machine for a few months, while they spend a few hundred (or thousand?) dollars (per machine) to examine them -- just to see if there's anything further to look at. Then they can mail you a letter if they want your key. In other words, the countermeasure would be so intolerable that the public wouldn't stand for it and Congress would have to take away the power.
It depends on what, in particular, you're concerned about.
Anything, really. As soon as bribable officials have access to your browser's password manager database or your email reader's stored login credentials, the risks resulting from the resale of the information, are so broad that there's simply no person who doesn't have something to be concerned about.
If we give the government all our data, everyone loses, except the bad guys that they're supposedly protecting us from.
There are two main theories groups that attempt to explain the creation of the Universe and the origin of life and humanity.
Group 1. Big Bang & Evolution. Essentially this version says, it all just happened, mostly by accident but with the amount of time and mass involved it was inevitable.
Bzzt, wrong. Group 1 knows the origin of humanity, but doesn't make any strong statements about the origin of life in general, or the origin of the universe. Group 1 merely says that Evolution and the Big Bang obviously happened. Group 1 also says they don't know what happened before that. They can't make any statements about origins, because there isn't any information to work with.
They keep making speculations about origins (particularly with life, since even though it's hard, it's a lot easier than the universe) but there's no consensus or unity. When scientists talk about origins, they're not a "group" at all, except that they're all saying, "Oh yeah? Show me why you think that" to the one who just advanced the speculation.
No wonder psychology's mysteries have always eluded me!
don't give me that pay rise; get a cappuccino machine and free coffee and I'll be happy... As I said to him, if I get free coffee at work, I don't have to pay for it
Except that you paid for it! The difference being that your payment would always be earmarked for coffee (which is fine if you were just going to spend it on coffee anyway (even during financial emergencies)). I guess it's also cool that you end up paying less tax on it.
He couldn't believe it
For once, I share a PHB's disorientation and confusion. It's a strange world.
Keep in mind that we're talking about L.A. Their County Board of Supervisors shouldn't be serving the needs of America; they should be serving their constituency, and "the biz" and its employees and the economy that feeds off of it, are their constituents. How large compared to their overall constituency it is, I don't know, but it's going to be skewed compared to the rest of America.
i dunno about powerless. i figure that if someone can screw things up with presidential powers, someone else ought to be able to unscrew things up using those powers.
But look at how the president screwed things up: by failing to veto. He didn't veto the PATRIOT Act (though it would have been overridden and pass anyway, if he had). He didn't veto the authorization to use force in Iraq.
President Bush also deserves credit for not vetoing the Repeal-the-DMCA Act. Unfortunately, Congress never sent that to his desk.
I'm not saying Americans shouldn't be furious with Bush, but they should also be furious with their incumbent Congresscritters too.
That's obviously Microsoft's version of traceroute.
SQL Server Management Studio
It sounds like a paint program of some kind; I think it paints graphs of which managers are in charge of what databases.
Photoshop
An online store who is getting its clock cleaned by free services such as flickr.
Windows Live Messenger
That's obvious a watchdog alert for sysadmins. When your Windows system is not live, this program makes your pager vibrate.
Remote Desktop Connection
That's a device driver for some kind of IR keyboard.
Adobe Acrobat Reader
I have to admit, that one is pretty transparent. Whenever you want to re-experience the time Evel Knieval jumped over a whole pueblo, this software gives a glorious and beautiful multimedia presentation about the feat. Absolutely second to none.
Stupid people are not found; they are cultivated. Most people have at least some amount of stupidity within them. The key is to nurture and encourage it to grow. We start this when our people are very young, and we never stop. We have entire industries dedicated to it, and institutions devoted to making sure that few people fall through the cracks.
With the proper regimen, I could turn you into a stupid person. If you're interested, I can send you some brochures.
Now, I put in crazy hours (80-100 hour weeks) and I *earned* that money
There's the problem. The only way we're going to improve the economy, is if people stop producing and working so much. If you work twice as much as a 40-hour-a-week person, you should be punished for it, by paying more tax instead of less.
It's the economy, stupid!
Here's the kicker, though. I spend maybe 1 or 2 days a week in my state, and I spend the rest of the time traveling.
If you can time travel, I'm not surprised you only spend 1 or 2 days out of every week, and have disorienting "crazy hours." On the plus side, you should be able to afford just about any tax at all. Geez, what a whiner. Just take some year-2000 dollars and buy some IBM stock in 1918, and you'll be skeet-shooting the Mona Lis-- oh wait, I misunderparsed your statement. Never mind. Sorry about the taxes.
There. You've been waiting for someone to say it, and I'm saying it: sorry about the taxes.
I wasn't aware that a "non-violent" thief was immune to shotgun pellets or slugs. Is that just the.410 shells or does the immunity include 12 gage as well?
Yes, the immunity applies to all types of ammunition, except for probably nuclear (though you really can't totally count on it, detonating a nuke in your neighborhood is likely to get him).
Why? Because he burgled the place when you weren't at home. By the time you detected that you have been burgled and reached for your gun, the thief had been gone for 3 hours. Hope you're a good tracker.
Of course, I'm presuming you don't have a home patrolrobot or a moat of sharks. If your weapons are carried by home patrolbots or moat-sharks, then nothing can possibly go wrong. You win.
Is there any chance they will do the right thing and provide a conversion utility to convert the DRM songs into non-DRM songs so the purchaser doesn't have the songs stolen back from them.
It would be a DMCA violation for Microsoft to traffic in such a tool. Doing the right thing is illegal.
If the price of the beer you drink has gone up because of the price of corn, then you need to do your taste buds a favor and quit drinking that piss water you've been calling beer.
And if someone plows under their barley field, to grow corn that they can sell at artificially government-inflated prices? Less barley for us.
Slashdot Mirror
But maybe it is our place to mock them when they knowingly do something to hurt themselves, and then complain about the consequences of their foolish choice.
They saw the word "Microsoft." They knew they would suffer (because it isn't 1977 anymore; Microsoft's values are well-known now) if they bought it. They bought it anyway. They suffered as a consequence. Then they complained about the suffering. Should we put our heads in the sand and pretend they're not ridiculous?
This was foreseeable, and lots of people foresaw it. And some people foresaw it but pretended they didn't, hoping someone else would fix their mistake. It didn't happen, and they'll now pay for their lack of integrity. I say we all join in and laugh and point.
I like how you think, friend, but..
If a tool is primarily intended for legal time-shifting, and the only way to accomplish that goal (legal time-shifting) is by circumventing access controls, then it is also primarily intended to circumvent access controls.
DMCA's prohibitions were never worded (and arguably, never intended) to merely prohibit circumvention by people who seek to do illegal things (such as violate copyright). It prohibits circumvention regardless of why your doing it, with some exemptions. Time-shifting is not one of the exemptions. Everything not explicitly allowed, is prohibited. That's one of the things that made it such an evil law.
I guess the trick is to help make everyone a POI. Do all that crap to everyone, and 10 people will be able to enter the country per day. Then someone in power with some sense -- no wait, let's be realistic: someone in power who is tired of getting thousands of complaints per day and being the subject of a TV news show every week -- will say, "fuck it, we have to stop doing this. I just got into government for the drug and 'escort' money; I didn't run for office to be ridiculed and impeached all the time. I have a meeting with a rich industrial lobbyist in 20 minutes, and those '60 Minutes' reporters are still here in my office, asking me what my response is to the recall petition. *sigh* Julie, get me Senator Disney on the phone. We need to talk about a bill that dissolves customs. I can give him 20 more years tacked onto copyright, if he'll support this for me."
Actually, that raises an interesting question. I suspect horse porn is not a violation of any federal laws, but probably a violation of some state laws. Does U.S. customs have a legitimate interest in that? Maybe anti-liberty states (e.g. Texas) need to put up their own state-customs on their highways and airports. Your international flight lands in Dallas, and a man says, "Congratulations, you have passed U.S. customs. Now stand in line for Texas' thoughtcrime filter."
What a way to miss the point. The premise is that the work you're doing, is not locally accessible. If you can work offline, then your work must be present on storage media that is passing through customs, and therefore may be compromised when government employees demand access to it.
Well, it's a question of whether or not "later analysis" is something you wait in line for, or something that happens later when you're already through. As long as you get through relatively unmolested, and with your machine, it's not too bad if they later want to spend their time detecting that personal secrets might have been present, and then try to crack AES -- all on their own time while you're not waiting and missing your connecting flights, appointments, etc.
As long as the machine appears to be "normal" to a superficial peek, you win. Their only countermeasure is to quarantine every entering machine for a few months, while they spend a few hundred (or thousand?) dollars (per machine) to examine them -- just to see if there's anything further to look at. Then they can mail you a letter if they want your key. In other words, the countermeasure would be so intolerable that the public wouldn't stand for it and Congress would have to take away the power.
Anything, really. As soon as bribable officials have access to your browser's password manager database or your email reader's stored login credentials, the risks resulting from the resale of the information, are so broad that there's simply no person who doesn't have something to be concerned about.
If we give the government all our data, everyone loses, except the bad guys that they're supposedly protecting us from.
Bzzt, wrong. Group 1 knows the origin of humanity, but doesn't make any strong statements about the origin of life in general, or the origin of the universe. Group 1 merely says that Evolution and the Big Bang obviously happened. Group 1 also says they don't know what happened before that. They can't make any statements about origins, because there isn't any information to work with.
They keep making speculations about origins (particularly with life, since even though it's hard, it's a lot easier than the universe) but there's no consensus or unity. When scientists talk about origins, they're not a "group" at all, except that they're all saying, "Oh yeah? Show me why you think that" to the one who just advanced the speculation.
Except that you paid for it! The difference being that your payment would always be earmarked for coffee (which is fine if you were just going to spend it on coffee anyway (even during financial emergencies)). I guess it's also cool that you end up paying less tax on it.
For once, I share a PHB's disorientation and confusion. It's a strange world.Keep in mind that we're talking about L.A. Their County Board of Supervisors shouldn't be serving the needs of America; they should be serving their constituency, and "the biz" and its employees and the economy that feeds off of it, are their constituents. How large compared to their overall constituency it is, I don't know, but it's going to be skewed compared to the rest of America.
He did not screw that woman!
But look at how the president screwed things up: by failing to veto. He didn't veto the PATRIOT Act (though it would have been overridden and pass anyway, if he had). He didn't veto the authorization to use force in Iraq.
President Bush also deserves credit for not vetoing the Repeal-the-DMCA Act. Unfortunately, Congress never sent that to his desk.
I'm not saying Americans shouldn't be furious with Bush, but they should also be furious with their incumbent Congresscritters too.
Sure, use present tense, and say copyright infringement instead of DMCA violation, and no one can say you're wrong. But still, shit happens.
Stupid people are not found; they are cultivated. Most people have at least some amount of stupidity within them. The key is to nurture and encourage it to grow. We start this when our people are very young, and we never stop. We have entire industries dedicated to it, and institutions devoted to making sure that few people fall through the cracks.
With the proper regimen, I could turn you into a stupid person. If you're interested, I can send you some brochures.
There's the problem. The only way we're going to improve the economy, is if people stop producing and working so much. If you work twice as much as a 40-hour-a-week person, you should be punished for it, by paying more tax instead of less.
It's the economy, stupid!
If you can time travel, I'm not surprised you only spend 1 or 2 days out of every week, and have disorienting "crazy hours." On the plus side, you should be able to afford just about any tax at all. Geez, what a whiner. Just take some year-2000 dollars and buy some IBM stock in 1918, and you'll be skeet-shooting the Mona Lis-- oh wait, I misunderparsed your statement. Never mind. Sorry about the taxes.
There. You've been waiting for someone to say it, and I'm saying it: sorry about the taxes.
Under communism, if you're billed while flying, they kill your estate.
No offense to your D&D 3rd edition wife, but if you had married a Pratchett dwarf instead, her wonderful programs would have fewer bugs.
Beardless dwarves: just say no!
Ah, but what if your slave was stealing your TV? (See, I knew I could still somehow turn this into a moral dilemma. Or at least an economic dilemma.)
Yes, the immunity applies to all types of ammunition, except for probably nuclear (though you really can't totally count on it, detonating a nuke in your neighborhood is likely to get him).
Why? Because he burgled the place when you weren't at home. By the time you detected that you have been burgled and reached for your gun, the thief had been gone for 3 hours. Hope you're a good tracker.
Of course, I'm presuming you don't have a home patrolrobot or a moat of sharks. If your weapons are carried by home patrolbots or moat-sharks, then nothing can possibly go wrong. You win.
What a relief, that if they try to pass it this year, we can count on a veto.
It would be a DMCA violation for Microsoft to traffic in such a tool. Doing the right thing is illegal.
And if someone plows under their barley field, to grow corn that they can sell at artificially government-inflated prices? Less barley for us.